Madison, Marley, and Macedonia

by Kirran Iveson

As the term ends, we can now take a ecnalg to the term and as Madison gets fatter, we can take “pets a” and take a look at how the past few months have been.

Let me begin by quickly explaining that Madison is not a person, she was simply a pre-labeled empty file folder that I adopted as my own when I first arrived in the BE Library. Throughout the term, I have been slowly feeding her and helping her to fulfill her purpose of containing papers once again.

If Madison could read her contents, she would be incredibly well versed in the world’s news from September 2013 through December 2013. Madison would also be able to stump even the most intrepid riddle-solver. Packed with rebuses, logic puzzles, and cryptics, Madison boasts an impressive repertoire.

However, throughout the term, before anything went to Madison it had to pass certain tests. Let’s start with the news. This test is simply subjectivity at its finest. I would trawl through the BBC each morning to find stories I thought the students should know about and would write short summaries on three stories. As a rule of thumb I would choose one world event story, one science story, and one new story that highlights an individual's achievements, but certain days consisted of just one story, such as the recent passing of Nelson Mandela.

In order for the riddles I post to find themselves within Madison’s embrace, they would first have to be solved by the students. Any unsolved riddle would remain posted until the answer was given. In fact, a few cryptic crossword clues remain up there from my tribute to the passing of John Graham, aka Araucaria, a much-beloved crossword creator for "The Guardian." However, a new riddle would be posted at the beginning of each week with occasional supplementary riddles popping up on a Wednesday or Thursday.

While feeding Madison’s hunger took up some hours of the morning, the rest of my days were mainly spent adding new books to our Mandarin system, commonly known amongst us elite librarians as “cataloguing.” Few realize how slow and arduous the task of cataloguing can be. With the infamous British system hiccup and The Great ALC Closure of ’13 (which we’ll all remember as the few days America had “no government” resulting in the closure of its library website), many factors can influence how fast we are able to catalogue. Not to mention Bob Marley (our printer) who won’t stop jamming. To be quite honest, I’m getting fed up of his songs and his repertoire has really suffered in his old age. I’m sure we’re all too familiar with hits such as “Paperless Paper Jam,” “Please Don’t Stop Now," and “Oops, it Appears I’ve Done it Again.” My all-time favourite used to be “A3 Blues,” but too many copiers out there started playing it as well (pun was SO intended).

The hardest aspect of cataloguing, without a doubt, is Dewey hunting. The difficulty of finding the Dewey decimal number for any given book can range from easy to “finding Waldo.” However, with excellent deductive skills you should be able to comb through the Internet to find the red and white rascal. Chopac, LinkCat, and ISBNdb may not mean a lot to most people, but they are a Dewey hunter’s godsend.

When there was a lull in the library and I found I had some free time, another co-op and I decided we would learn every single country’s flag.

And we did. I currently know every autonomous country’s flag, along with some very strange ones involving hats on sticks and beheadings (good ol’ Preraria and Benin).

To contribute back to the students, we put on a library lecture all about flags and vexillology. Perhaps some may think it’s not the most stimulating and engaging of topics, but we made it fun and the students who did come said they enjoyed it.

To really sum up my time in the library, I made sure that whatever I was doing both furthered my knowledge on a subject as well as the students’ - or at least provided an option for them to learn about it. I love reading the news, so I made the summaries; I love riddles and solving them, so I gave the students riddles to challenge them; I learned all about flags, so I made a presentation on it – all of these are things I very much enjoy, and I made sure I brought it into my work.

The library is a place for learning. World events, riddles, and flags are only three options. There are thousands of knowledge fields: impart what you can to the kids and make sure you learn along the way. J